Some entertaining chat last Friday on Dr Dunphy's Daily Radio Chrestomathy. The subject was Premiership wages and Mark Lawrenson had introduced us to the concept of Netto. Netto is a system of payment where you announce your astronomical wage and merely by breathing the word netto in the same sentence you have it understood that the figure is net. The tax end of your affairs are taken care of before you see any money. Lawro says that Roy Keane is on £52,000 a week netto!. See netto is like the lotto only bettero.
All this tumbled out vis-a-vis David Beckham's demand that Manchester United pay him £160,000 a week starting soon. That figure is , ahem, grosso, but as Lawro pointed out it is designed to get Becks out of the ghetto and over the magical £100,000 a week netto barrier. He's gotten by so far because the wife works but nobody wants to see that continue.
From Lawro, Eamo and Gilesy there was surprising goodwill towards this venture. Beckham is no better a player than Giles or Lawrenson were (and certainly a less talented controversialist than Dr Dunphy) yet in his 1970 classic, Forward With Leeds, (still my favourite bedside reading) Johnny G describes how he left Manchester United and signed for Leeds for (gasp!) the sum of £35,000, a figure large enough to prove that "Leeds had the financial resources to support their ambitions." The old boys looked back on the quaint pay packets of their own playing days and decided that it was good to see young players getting the big slice of pie which they themselves had been deprived of all those years ago. I agree but if football is to remain viable there has to be a limit. I expect David Beckham will test that limit. Two things about Beckham. A nice chap who gets an inordinately rough time because he loves his wife and son. Off the field he's not quite as dim as he's made out to be but on the field he's not quite as good as he thinks he is. So when he reached the conclusion that if Roy Keane gets £52,000 a week (netto) he, Becks, should get £100,000 a week (netto) he needed somebody to tell him to go and have a lie down. Beckham is not worth any multiple of Keane. More than that, he is not worth it to Manchester United, a club who are unprecedentedly rich but not silly with it.
United are the richest club in the world according to the figures for the 1998/1999 season which were recently released. In fact, they are by some distance (33 per cent) the richest, their turnover of £111 million being £27.5 million greater than Bayern Munich's.
Yet wages are eating away the foundations. United announced last October that their pre-tax profits for the year till July 31st 2000 were just £16 million (Beckham's proposed new wage would account for half of this figure straight off). In that same period operating expenses, of which the bulk are wages, had increased from £54.4 million to £65.8 million. United are doing alright and have since signed a big deal with Nike and will benefit from an improved TV deal but if they permit Beckham's wage to rise significantly above Roy Keane's then the other four or five Manchester United players who are in a queue outside Ferguson's office will be spitting their dummies out and sulking.
Worse. The difficulty is not just United's. When wages rise at one club the pressure is applied to other big clubs. If Beckham is worth this (netto) well I'm worth that (netto). Pretty soon the 10 richest clubs will own all the best players and the character of the game as we have known it will be lost.
The FA Cup, for all the oul guff about its indelible romance, is already a casualty. In the era of big panels the larger clubs can win it with just one eye on the ball. The five-year period just finished has seen the Cup go to Manchester United (twice), Chelsea (twice) and Arsenal (once). Twenty years ago the same period threw up Southampton, Manchester United, Ipswich, Arsenal and West Ham. Thirty years ago Everton, Spurs, WBA, Manchester City and Chelsea.
In turnover terms the average Premiership club is five times larger than the average Division One club. We are already into a situation whereby seven out of 10 Premiership clubs make a profit but nine out of 10 non-Premiership clubs make a loss. More. Hitherto these losses have been somewhat offset by the odd lucrative (but dispiriting) sale of a good player to a bigger club. Europe is about to change all that though and the medium to longterm consequences are scary.
With developments like the G14 (a coalition of Europe's bigger clubs) the powerbase in football is gradually moving away from federations and into the hands of clubs and the people they do business with. It isn't hard to imagine a European league within a decade which will employ perhaps the 350 best footballers in the world.
There are remedies. Smaller clubs must push for greater revenue-sharing among clubs when it comes to TV deals and the example of several US sports should be followed in terms of skewing the income from new media sources to smaller clubs. The latest TV bonanza opens the ways for stations like MUTV to put recorded Premiership action on air. Pay per view can't be too far away and then the disparities in wealth will be terminal.
When Manchester United look at David Beckham and his demands the bottom line could mean that they would rather sell him for £25 million than meet his demands for the next few years and bury themselves under an avalanche of other demands. In the long term the game needs to look at fair salary caps for clubs to level the playing field. In the short term a luxury tax on the profits of clubs with wage bills above a certain level would help. These things must be done or the game is about to get smaller. Netto or not.
